The Shawnee ( shaw-NEE) are a Native American people of the Northeastern Woodlands. Their language, Shawnee, is an Algonquian language.
The Shawnee precontact homeland was likely centered in southern Ohio. In the 17th century, they dispersed throughout Ohio, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. In the early 18th century, they were primarily concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania but later that century dispersed again across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, with a small group joining the Muscogee people in Alabama.
The Shawnee fought many wars to attempt to stay in their ancestral homelands, first against the British in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Pontiac's War (1763), and Lord Dunmore's War (1774), then against the Americans in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the Northwest Indian War (1786–1795), and Tecumseh's War and the War of 1812 (1810–1815). After the death of Tecumseh and the end of the War of 1812, the Shawnee signed several treaties ceding land to the U.S. federal government. The U.S. finally removed them under the 1830 Indian Removal Act to areas west of the Mississippi River; these lands would later become the states of Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. They were subsequently removed again to Indian Territory, which became the state of Oklahoma in the early 20th century.
Today, Shawnee people are enrolled in three federally recognized tribes: the Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and Shawnee Tribe, all headquartered in Oklahoma.
Shawnee has also been written as Shaawana and Shawanese. Individuals and singular Shawnee tribes may be referred to as šaawanwa, while the collective Shawnee people may be referred to as šaawanwaki or šaawanooki.
Algonquian languages include words similar to the archaic shawano (now: shaawanwa), meaning "south". However, the stem šawa- does not mean "south" in Shawnee, but rather "moderate, warm (of weather)": See Charles F. Voegelin, "šawa (plus -ni, -te) Moderate, Warm. Cp. šawani 'it is moderating...". In one Shawnee tale, "Sawage" (šaawaki) is the deity of the south wind. Jeremiah Curtin translates Sawage as 'it thaws', referring to the warm weather of the south. In an account and a song collected by C. F. Voegelin, šaawaki is attested as the spirit of the South, or the South Wind.
The Shawnee language is known as saawanwaatoweewe. In 2002, the Shawnee language, a part of the Algonquian family, was in decline but was still spoken by approximately 200 people. These included more than 100 Absentee Shawnee and 12 Shawnee Tribe speakers. By 2017, Shawnee language advocates, including tribal member George Blanchard, estimated that there were fewer than 100 speakers. Most fluent Shawnee speakers are over the age of 50.
The language is written in the Latin script, but attempts to create a unified spelling system have been unsuccessful. The Shawnee language has a dictionary, and portions of the Bible have been translated into Shawnee.
Some scholars have proposed that the Shawnee descend from the precontact Fort Ancient culture of the Ohio region, although this interpretation is not universally accepted. Other scholars suggest that the Shawnee entered the region at a later period and subsequently occupied Fort Ancient sites.
Fort Ancient culture flourished from c. 1000 to c. 1650 CE among populations that predominantly inhabited lands along both sides of the Ohio River in areas corresponding to present-day southern Ohio, northern Kentucky, and western West Virginia. Like contemporaneous Mississippian culture societies, Fort Ancient peoples constructed earthwork mounds as integral components of their religious, social, and political systems. Fort Ancient culture was once interpreted as a regional manifestation of Mississippian cultural influence; however, scholars now generally conclude that Fort Ancient culture (1000–1650 CE) developed primarily from the earlier Hopewell culture (100 BCE–500 CE). The Hopewell peoples likewise constructed mounds as central elements of their social, political, and religious organization. Among their most prominent monuments are large earthwork effigy mounds, including Serpent Mound in present-day Ohio.
The ultimate fate of the Fort Ancient peoples remains uncertain. It is widely thought that their society, like that of Mississippian cultures farther south, was profoundly disrupted by successive waves of epidemic disease introduced through early contact with Spanish explorers during the 16th century. Archaeological evidence from the period after 1525 at the Madisonville site, the type site, indicates that village house sizes became smaller and less numerous. Additional findings suggest a departure from a previously "horticulture-centered, sedentary way of life".
A gap exists in the archaeological record between the most recent Fort Ancient sites and the earliest sites associated with the historic Shawnee. The latter were documented by European (French and English) archaeologists as occupying the region at the time of sustained contact. Scholars generally accept that similarities in material culture, artistic traditions, mythology, and Shawnee oral histories linking them to Fort Ancient peoples support the possibility of a cultural and historical connection between Fort Ancient society and the historical Shawnee. At the same time, evidence and oral traditions also associate Siouan-speaking nations with the Ohio Valley, reflecting the region's complex and multiethnic history.
The Shawnee regarded the Lenape (or Delaware) of the Mid-Atlantic region along the East Coast as their "grandfathers," reflecting a perceived ancestral relationship. Other Algonquian nations—particularly those in present-day Canada extending inland along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes—considered the Shawnee to represent their southernmost branch. Along the Atlantic seaboard, Algonquian-speaking tribes were historically concentrated primarily in coastal regions, extending from present-day Quebec southward to the Carolinas.
Europeans reported encountering the Shawnee across a wide geographic area. One of the earliest possible references to the Shawnee appears on a 1614 Dutch map depicting a group identified as Sawwanew located just east of the Delaware River. Later 17th-century Dutch sources also place them in this general region. Accounts by French explorers from the same century more commonly situated the Shawnee along the Ohio River, where they were encountered during French expeditions originating from eastern Canada and the Illinois Country.
Based on historical accounts and later archaeological evidence, John E. Kleber describes Shawnee towns as follows:"A Shawnee town might have from forty to one hundred bark-covered houses similar in construction to Iroquois longhouses. Each village usually had a meeting house or council house, perhaps sixty to ninety feet long, where public deliberations took place."
According to English colonial legend, some Shawnee were believed to descend from a party sent by Chief Opechancanough, ruler of the Powhatan Confederacy from 1618 to 1644, to settle in the Shenandoah Valley. This party was reportedly led by his son, Sheewa-a-nee. Edward Bland, an explorer who accompanied Abraham Wood's expedition in 1650, wrote that during Opechancanough's lifetime there had been a conflict between a Chawan chief and a weroance of the Powhatan, who was also a relative of Opechancanough's family. Bland stated that the latter had murdered the former. The Shawnee were later "driven from Kentucky in the 1670s by the Iroquois of Pennsylvania and New York, who claimed the Ohio valley as hunting ground to supply its fur trade. In 1671, the colonists Batts and Fallam reported that the Shawnee were contesting control of the Shenandoah Valley with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois) and were losing that contest.
Sometime prior to 1670, a group of Shawnee migrated to the Savannah River region. These Shawnee made contact with English colonists based in Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1674, and the two groups formed a long-lasting alliance. The Savannah River Shawnee became known to the Carolina English as the "Savannah Indians." At roughly the same time, other Shawnee groups migrated to Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and additional regions south and east of the Ohio country. Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, founder of New Orleans and the French colony of La Louisiane, wrote in his journal in 1699 that the Shawnee (whom he spelled Chaouenons) were "the single nation to fear, being spread out over Carolina and Virginia in the direction of the Mississippi."